David Lynch and Time: Textures of Ageing

Abstract

The chapter addresses the question of time in David Lynch’s work. It has often been said that Lynch always complicates our sense of time to the extent that time dissolves altogether. However, in this chapter I argue that this is not always the case. David Lynch is in many works occupied with the passing of time; my point, however, is that he never constructs time as simply straight-out linear. I discuss how the close-ups of Alvin’s ageing face in The Straight Story show time’s passing as a disorderly network of lines and I discuss the construction of the passing of time by Lynch’s use of a range of the same actors and actresses, now aged by 25 years, in Twin Peaks: – The Return. The chapter engages with what I have called textures of ageing and discusses two different clusters of images. First, David Lynch’s great black and white photographs of deserted factory buildings and his series of melting snowmen and second, images of older people in Lynch’s works.

When you see an aging building or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building, there is no more magic to that building. But if it is allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added to it—it’s so organic.

—The vignette “Beauty” in Lynch (2006: 119)

Kristine McKenna: Do you think all things are beautiful as they decay or only some things?

David Lynch: All things are.

—Lynch in McKenna (2007: 35)